Mapping the Customer Experience - Why and How?

An experience map is the portrait of your customers’ experience in their different interactions with your organization.

Experience mapping provides in-depth insight into the journey your customers take or will take before, during and after using (usually the result of a sale) your product or services. It is a strategic tool for acquiring important information regarding the complex customer interactions that occur between the customers and your products, services and corporate ecosystem. At the centre of an experience map lies the customer journey model; an archetypal journey created from an aggregate of all customers going from point A to point B as they attempt to achieve a goal or accomplish certain objective or satisfy a need.

Experience maps have become important tool over the past few years, largely because companies are realizing the inter-connections among the cross-channel experiences.

One of the important aspects of user experience is finding the sweet spot between the needs of users and business and designing products or services that fills the gap. This means, we need to understand the impacts of our design and experience on the user and we need to measure the impact. During the process of UX design, we map different user tasks as task flows or explain user’s thoughts or feelings at certain points using scenarios. We can get a complete picture if we put all these fragmented scenarios together and map them all. In simple terms, this is called as an Customer Experience Map.

A Customer Journey Map can be a very useful tool to understand and improve customer experience. It logs the customer experience from the customer’s side; which in turn helps us to understand how customers interact with the system today, but also uncover opportunities for improvement, new customer acquisition, enhance customer retention and engagement, improve customer satisfaction and the entire brand image.

“Over 50% of global marketers report that they have fair, little, or no knowledge of the customer demographic, behavioural, psychographic and transactional data. Just 6% say they have excellent knowledge of the customer.”  - Source: CMO Council Study.

So if we sum up the key benefits of anExperience Map, it may look like the following:

• It makes the customer experience understandable and makes it easier to improve it.

• It helps us find critical ‘moments of truth’ for the user: so we can focus on these points to make significant improvements much more achievable.

• It helps us unify all types of outbound communication channels and set a common standard and focus points.

• It also helps us to better align customer values and business values.

Prior to getting into creatingCustomer Experience Maps, it will be a good idea to understand few terminologies.

Personas(or customer personas): Are detailed representations of the different segments of the target audience. It takes into account the age, gender, social demography, religion, income, education, social status etc.

Touch-points: Customers interact with your business through many different channels; which may include Walking into your store or outlet, meeting with your sales rep, website, mobile applications, emails or phone calls to the call or support centre etc. These are called as touch points or channels where your customer comes into contact with your organization. It is important because by identifying different touch points and their interaction standards with the customers, it will be possible to identify and compare the standards across different touch points and measure the customer experience with each of them. This can be the key to improve the quality of these channels.

Customer Journey Map:An archetypal journey created from a specific group of customers (Personas) going from point A to point B as they attempt to achieve a goal or accomplish certain objective or satisfy a need. In simple terms, it is a set of process a similar group of customers go through in order to access or use specific product or service an organization offers. Keep in mind that different types of personas have their specific needs that vary from one persona to another. A dynamic young entrepreneur will probably be happier to use Mobile banking facility to do their day to day banking; but an older person may feel more comfortable to get some banking work done by physically going to the bank or going online. What it tells is, depending on what type of customer you are, you are likely to come across different set of touch points when you complete your journey as customer in order to access certain products or services. Not only that, the same persona that uses mobile banking, may also avail retail-banking facility by taking another customer journey. When we map these specific journeys using time, Touch-points and actions, it becomes Customer Journey Map of that specific journey.

Experience Map:It provides a generalized rendering of the customer’s journey. It takes into account all types of customers and all the Touch-points that customers can possibly come across at a different time span in order to access the products or services. Experience Map is the generalized summary of various Customer Journey Maps. It is necessary to assess the quality of the customer journey map in order to improve the customer experience. Ways to do are independent research, social media comments, website surveys, discussion forums etc.

Moments of truth(MoT):MoTs are significant Touch-points in the customer journey that can make or break a customer experience and create a lasting impression of the organization in the customer’s mind. An example of a moment of truth could be talking with a customer service representative when trying to resolve an issue involving a defective product or service.

Pain points:Pain Points are Touch-points that are perceived to be significantly difficult or frustrating, like waiting in a long line. Interactions at pain points may inspire customers to abandon a service, to never return, and/or to recommend against it. Addressing these issues is critical to improving the customer experience.

Pleasure points:These are the opposite of pain points. They are Touch-points that delight customers, meeting or exceeding their expectations for the interaction. Pleasure points contribute to an excellent customer experience and can serve as inspiration for improving other Touch-points. This also tells us that these are the areas that may get less focus when it comes to improving the system.

Blind spots:  Uncovering unknown or misunderstood Touch-points is a particularly valuable outcome of Touch-points mapping. These are called Blind Spots.

Measurement:It is important to device and use proper measurement tools and standards in order to analyze the customer experience. These metrics and tools could be; number of failed or abandoned checkouts, time spent on the website, wait time to get a customer support etc.

Response:It is important to use the finding of the experience map to prioritize resources and act on to improve standards of customer satisfaction. By prioritizing the elements of a customer experience map, we can take care of the most important factors that influence the customer experience or satisfaction the most.

As we have become familiar to the key terminologies, lets proceed to create an effective ‘customer experience map.’

Prior to getting started, lets’ define and identify the purpose. Why you need the experience map and what would be the uses of the map. Will it be used to improve products or services or eliminate unnecessary product or service offerings; etc. Pre-requisite to this process can be understanding the business process, product, services and identifying the different channels.

You have identified the purpose. Now you need to set certain goals and standards. Goals could be reducing transaction completion time by 30 minutes; or ability to reach customer support within 1 minute.

And at the end, you may have to look for switching priorities between different channels in order to meet or exceed your goal. Remember customers don’t care about channels. They care about getting better experience and getting job done faster. On the standard side, it can be being the best in the industry by offering longest banking hours or providing fastest check-in facility around the entire Airline industry. 

The first step of creatingCustomer Experience Map is to create different Journey Maps. Keep in mind that no two journey maps are exactly the same.In order to put together a visual representation of how a customer not only moves through each phase of interacting with a company but how he experiences each one, we can start with building a Channel Inventory and Touch-points inventory associated to each channels after conducting qualitative and quantitative research.For example, for retailers, a common Touchpoint would be a product description page – in a business selling services it could be anything from a pricing page to a contact form.

Channels could be conventional retail, web or mobile. Or you can categorize them as digital or physical channel. It all depends on your company policy. Each channel has different set of Touch-points. It is possible that these multiple channels may meet at a specific phase of a customer journey.  For example, an online shopper (digital channel) may have to call customer support (phone channel) Touchpoint if he needs help. On the other hand, different channels may use same Touchpoint. A good example may be user may be using ATM Machine (digital channel) to draw cash and conventional Teller counter (physical channel) to deposit a cheque while using the retail bank branch as Touchpoint.

Next thing will be identifying the present and potential customer types, their age, gender, income, social and demographic groups; which will help you identify their needs, limits, expectations, thoughts, point of excitements etc. Based on this customer profile, you need to develop different types of personas, which represent each of these key groups.

Now you may start creating an inventory of all Touch-points a customer has with the product or service – both large and small. You can group them by channel (website, call centre, social media, etc) and give an indication of roughly where in the customer’s side they fit.

Next elements are the research activities you conduct, such as stakeholder interviews, customer surveys and contextual enquiries (primary research), and existing business documentation or industry reports (secondary research). Customer surveys play a key role about finding out how customers expect from the company, their individual experiences with Touch-points, how do they do research before taking action or making decisions, Google analytics analysis of web traffic etc.

Now summarize all the critical components; which may look like the following:

• Represent your Customer’s perspective.  The customer journey map needs to represent the interactions as your customer experiences it.  It often includes interactions that happen outside of your control, such as a social media interaction or a phone discussion about your service with customer and his friend etc.  

• Use research.  Don’t make it just makes a process map. Depending on the scope, the customer journey map process can involve interviews possibly combined with surveys.  Some companies bring in customers and build them interactively with internal staff.  

• Represent Customer segments. Different segments typically have very different customer experiences.  Some segmentation methods include:

  • Demographic. Best Buy built customer segments such as Jill (the Soccer Mom) or Buzz (the young tech enthusiast), creating successful store offerings around each.

  • Behavioural. Health insurance companies build segmentation schemes around consumer behaviour and demographics such as Young and Healthy or Chronics.

  • Psychographic. Can be based on lifestyle, opinions, hobbies, or similar items. Grocery stores use segments such as the Indulgent Shopper and the Convenience Shopper.

  • Geographic. Suburban, rural, and urban are common B2C segments.

  • Industry. Most B2B companies include at least some segmentation around industry.

• Include Customer goals.  A great customer journey map shows your customer’s goals at each stage of the process. Goal could be getting preliminary information of your insurance products or submitting the form within a certain deadline etc.  

• Focus on emotions and feelings.  Feelings and emotions are critical to any experience, whether B2B or B2C, and a great customer journey map communicate these emotions. An outstanding customer journey map will create a deep bond between products and customers and will deeply engage customers in such a way that I call it ‘Emotional Ecstasy’. Great example of this is Apple products.

• Represent and map out various Touch-points.  The customer journey map is often built to communicate the order and type of Touch-points – including those not in your control. When Touch-points mapping is done right, we gather deep insights about all Touch-points across the journey from the customer’s perspective. Uncovering Touch-points that were previously unknown or misunderstood is a particularly valuable outcome of Touch-points mapping. Plus you get a clear idea about the ones that requires priority, the others that needs improvements and also the ones that you can’t control. Starbucks learned that interactions with baristas were a highlight for in-store customers, but those who used the drive-through option missed out on that experience. Furthermore, drive-through customers struggled to communicate their orders over the traditional drive-through microphones and faced long wait times, creating a painful step in the customer journey. To improve the customer experience at this specific Touch-points, Starbucks recently began testing a new ordering system that uses a video screen and camera at the point of ordering, allowing customers and employees to interact.

• Highlight moments of truth.  Some interactions have more impact than others. Great journey maps separate those critical moments of truth from the rest. For example, when visiting a place, a bad check-in experience of the hotel may ruin the entire hotel stay experience.

• Measure your brand promise. A critical outcome of a great customer journey map is measuring how your experience supports your brand promise.  If your brand promise is to be effortless, highly customized, or unique, then your journey map is an excellent way to document whether your customer feels you are meeting that goal.

• Include time. Experience length provides important context. Did customers spend 20 seconds or 60 minutes on phone waiting to get customer support?

• Break the experience into phases.  In a longer experience, customers are accomplishing different things at different times. For example, early shopping phases typically involve trying to figure out what questions to ask, whereas later phases are more transactional.  By understanding the customer’s mindset at each phase, you can customize the experience around relevant needs.

• Include Customers and Non-Customers. A pre-sales customer journey map should always include non-customers, as they may follow a different path to make a decision.  

• And lastly, identify or explore the possibility of creating some moments during that journey or experience that will engage customers or create a deep mental bond with your offerings and organization. Simple example could be, a customer walks into your branch or store and you greet him/her by name or even offer him/her favourite coffee or tea by knowing that particular customer’s taste. This will act as instant bond builder by giving customer a kind of comfort of being at home.
  

You have summarized all the components and gathered all the information. Now try to answer the following questions:

  -Who took the journey? (Profile of the customer)

  -What was the reason behind taking the journey?

  -What was the action customer had to take in order to complete the journey?

  -What were the customer expectations?

  -What was the feeling towards specific actions that customer had to take?

  -What was the thought at a specific moment?

  -What Touch-points customer had to interact with and how was the impact?

  -What other events were involved which may not have directly influenced the journey?

  -What physical and digital components were involved?

  -Where all these actions took place?

  - When all these actions took place?

You can start the mapping process by defining the behavioural stages a typical customer will go through then more specifically by each Touchpoint.

With that in place, you can bring in the customer personas to create a “lens” by which to view the journey. Each persona can yield it’s own map – becoming the reference point by which to base the journey.

Depending on the business, the stages your customers will go through while accomplishing certain tasks may be different. After looking through your personas built on your initial qualitative and quantitative research, you’ll have a pretty good idea the process your customers go through in order to do certain jobs. It could be opening up a new bank account or doing online shopping etc. Put some thought into what your customers want to achieve as they move through each phase. Then, you’ll be able to see if you have the necessary places in your system (0r process) to support those goals.

Types of data to mine to understand what the goals are:

• Survey answers

• User testing feedback

• Interview transcripts

• Customer service emails or support transcripts

Next determine if your customers are achieving their goals easily and effectively. This is where you bring the data you’ve collected and measure it against how easily your customers can get done what they need to do.

Ask yourself the following types of questions:

• Where are roadblocks appearing?

• Are people abandoning their purchases on the checkout page in large numbers?

• Are you finding that the people clicking on your opt in download page are not actually signing up to get the free download?
  

Next you should start putting your Touchpoint inventory together and associate them with your personas.

Now start drawing the customer journey maps. You can start with using a white board, few different coloured markers and some coloured sticky notes. You can write down the Touch-points (kiosk, check-in counter etc.), personas, locations (home, city block etc.), feelings (happy, unhappy etc.), channels etc., on specific coloured sticky notes on the sticky notes and stick them on the white board in the order of the customer journey.

Use markers to connect them by drawing paths and arrowheads to show directions. If you make mistake, re-draw the path and move the sticky notes to refine the order and the path. It could happen that you may have forgotten to include self check-in kiosks for hotel check-in process; or you may have added self check-in Touchpoint at a wrong place in the journey map; or it could be that a new set of activities may have to be included which you didn’t consider before etc. Keep doing that until you are able to draw the complete customer journey map on the board. Now you can take a picture and draw a visually and graphically appealing final journey map on your computer. Draw as many Journey Maps as required based on the number or type of product/service offerings through different channels and type of personas. Make sure to be a storyteller as opposed to just creating a street guide sort of navigator. Think of mind, emotions, feelings and irritations, problems or happiness that user is experiencing as he is taking this journey and coming across different Touch-points. So you are also trying to create a mental model of customer expectation and motivations towards specific Touch-points. Also make sure you include time and place into it. For example, a young office going professional may prefer to do banking after 5pm and near his work place.Data you have gathered from different sources (such as customer support call logs, customer interviews etc.) will give you clear picture of the issues and you will need to mark them on the map and associate them with the Touch-points to know precisely where the issue(s) are and what’s causing them.

Now, you start to look at the different journey maps and identify different paths that meet at certain point of time, location or Touchpoint. Next thing you do is, start to combine them based on these meeting points. Now whatever is left that didn’t coincide, can be added to the map. Now you get a complete single window picture of the entire customer journey map ecosystem and this becomes your Experience Map.

For your reference, I have included examples of Customer Experience map and Customer Journey map which you will find as below. If you study them properly, you will be able to see the difference between the two. 

Conclusion:Experience maps are not limited to cross-channel experiences. It’s about harmonizing multiple Touch-points that customers come across at different points of time. As there is no standard way of creating an experience map, I advise to use lot of research data, customer profiling and be analytical and creative. Different customer journey mapping may involve different types of data source and may require custom design the process. That’s why it is important to go through some mock exercises to gain some insight and experience. This article can serve as a general guideline and is designed to provide the broader perspective of the Journey or Experience Mapping process. How it will influence your real life process, will depend on your specific real life needs and scenarios. And these needs could be organizational planning, surface and prioritize initiatives towards improving customer satisfaction, providing guiding principles of design and user experience, streamlining product or services offering basket etc. And lastly, this is more like a theory that you can apply in your practice.